A wide dark valley. Looking out over it with a number of friends from when I was young. The landscape is like central California in grayscale, hellish, a bit like how I would imagine Dante's Tuscan hills. I am the first one to set off for the other side of the valley, where I can see a huge rickety wood-and-ceramic structure that needs to be scaled. At the base, I find a narrow opening with a steep and uneven staircase of polished wood. I climb inside and upwards with my friends behind me. And after some time I emerge into a chamber, appointed in a kind of futurist high-nautical style -- polished brass, teak, leather upholstery -- with a bank of convex windows through which one can see a complete cityscape. It's dusk in a city that is permanently overcast. To the right there are two identical backlit billboards advertising a service I do not recognize in a script I cannot read. Far below is an empty street. And in every direction there are dozens of distant buildings similar to the one I am in. Men like me are also peering from their convex windows. The air is close; by now a few of my friends have stepped into the chamber with me. And two things become clear at the same time: I have been here before, I have lived here. And I am in an enormous concentration camp, about to witness the great genocide. The last one.